Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu. As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need every hand on deck to ensure it not only meets but exceeds the standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Andrej Znidarsic, from the Ubuntu Slovenian LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

The Slovenian Ubuntu LoCo team was founded in 2005 and we try to spread Ubuntu mainly by translation work and help and support to Slovenian Ubuntu users who don’t have the means (either language or technical knowledger barrier) to solve problems themselves. Slovenian has been among the top translated languages for a while, which is quite impressive considering there are only 2 million native speakers and we don’t have a big pool to get translators from. We operate an IRC channel, website, forum, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page. Offline we meet at monthly Ubuntu hours and we do Global Jams :)

What kind of event are you organizing for the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam (UGJ)?

We are mostly going to focus on translations. This has traditionally been our strong point, as we exceeded 90% translation of Ubuntu about 2 years ago. Now we are focusing on translation quality and consistency. This time we want to put extra polish into translation for the LTS. In addition to that, a couple of people will focus on creating videos explaining how to perform basic tasks in Ubuntu (installing Ubuntu, Installing/removing software, Unity “tricks”…) and how to contribute to Ubuntu (how to start translating in Launchpad, how to report a bug, common translation mistakes in Slovenian). We will also be testdriving Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and report bugs we find on the way. More info can be found in our Ubuntu Global Jam announcement (in Slovenian only).

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

Nope. We have already organized 3 Ubuntu Global Jams. The first one was online only and the last two have been organized offline. We are quite lucky to have Kiberpipa, which has kindly been providing us a great venue with a lot of space and internet access. So we mostly need to do marketing of the event, coordinate transport and grab some pizzas :).

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

The results of previous UGJs have typically meant about 4000-5000 translated messages for us which is amazing for one day. Good translation coverage helps to grow Ubuntu usage in Slovenia. We have also managed to report a couple of bugs which improved overall quality. More importantly, in average about 15 people attend our global jam, so we meet and hang out with people we usually only see online. This vastly improves team cohesiveness. In addition there are always some newcomers, which is fantastic for community growth. Also, it’s fun :).